Don’t be so quick to blame police

November 9, 2012

This letter is in response to the way the village and state police have been handling the matters on racial profiling, slurs, evident "drug use," etc.

Now if we are not all already informed, assaults took place on a white male who was maliciously stabbed and sliced across the neck and face during a disagreement. (Editor's note: The writer said she is referring to an incident on Aug. 10 in Saranac Lake.) The suspect who committed this extremely aggressive and harsh assault was, in fact, of a different race, and since this altercation there has never been so much feed on the racial ignorance of our fellow officers. And that suspect claims the disagreement was over being called racial slurs!

I have encountered the police frequently, under many unfortunate circumstances, but never has it come to my attention that they do not act when the law is broken and further action is appropriate. To the staff member of Romano's lanes in Saranac Lake: By the description of the very obnoxious things coming from the pill-and-Enterprise-sniffing bandit, I am pretty sure 99 percent of the entire North Country could guess that person. You don't mention his name but describe him to a tee, and with that said, there are definitely much more dangerous things that man can do. It's not about race; it's about defusing the current situation and analyzing the people you encounter. For example, a policeman arrests a man for snorting a white powder. They then have to send that powder for testing because it is a pharmaceutical and crushed, so unidentafiable. This costs money. By the time they get the test back, maybe the person has committed something far worse, which, in the history of this person's crimes, that seems to be his potential. So you see, it's not because they don't think it's wrong. But it could be worse ...